...as sweet as chocolate, as turbulent as the ocean

I've learned to play "Oh Come All Ye Faithful"! It's like my favorite song ever! And it wasn't hard... The arrangements I saw online were too difficult for me, but I just want to learn the basic melody, and now I have. So I'm excited about it. I also like "We Wish You a Merry Christmas"and also learned that.

I need a musical advice now... How do you play notes of different durations in the left hand and right hand. E.g. the right hand plays dotted quarter note, eighth, quarter note, and the left hand plays three quarter notes[1]... I just can't manage that; it breaks my sense of rhythm. I can do the left hand or the right hand on their own okay, but combining is hard. Let me know if you have any tips.

[1] Picture is worth a thousand words, so here's an excerpt from the song that shows what I mean:

Oh and one more thing! When you're first learning, it might help just to focus on tapping the rhythm out on the top of the piano, so you're not focusing so much on notes. Count it out and tap whichever hand(s) have notes to play.

When I was teaching people to first learn to play both hands together, I did a number of things.

1) Practice both hands seperately until you're comfortable with both.2) Learn to count to yourself (out loud to start, then in your head) while you're playing. In this case, you'd be counting 'one-and two-and three-and, one-and two-and three-and' since you're in 3/4 time). Learn how the different note lengths feel when you're counting like this.3) Once you've got the counting down on both hands seperately, slow it *way* down (at least half-speed to start) and concentrate on hitting the notes on the proper counting marks with both hands.

It takes a lot of getting used to when you first start, but from what I've seen (and vaguely what I remember, I've been playing since I was 4 or so), it just sort of clicks one day.

... Oops. And the other thing I did was what I illustrated -- two different coloured pens, one showing the three beats to each measure, the other dividing the quarter note beats into eighth note beats.

I would learn the left hand until it was second nature, then just play the left hand and sing the melody while not using your right hand at all. If you can sing the melody while you play and it starts to fall into your head right, then you can start to add the right hand in and it will make sense to you.

What helped me deal with the rhythms was a metronome. I used to have one that would beep differently at the "and" of "one and two and three and", so I could figure out more easily what I was supposed to play.

Also, I agree with the outloud counting as well as the tapping on the piano thing. It's just a matter of practice :)

I agree with what others said - learn the left hand first, and once you are really stable with it, add the right one. Counting really helps, too. I'd do it out loud first, and later silently in your head.